THEIR_VIRGIN_PRINCESS (34 page)

Oliver put a hand over his face, nearly moaning his words.
“It was in our room that night. I joked with Yas that she wouldn’t be able to
drink it for another eight months. She wasn’t in bed early that morning. I
thought she’d gone to say good-bye to you, but she didn’t, did she?”

Nausea washed over her. “No. Oliver, was it your idea for me
to take the plane and go to Australia?”

“No. The idea never even occurred to me. I actually argued
against it when Yas brought it up. I didn’t think you should go off on your
own, but she was so insistent. She’s been…unstable lately, very emotional and
angry. I haven’t quite known what to do with her.”

“Is that why you cheat on me with my whore bitch cousin?”

Alea gasped and whirled to the sound of that voice,
completely startled as Yasmin entered the room, lifted a gun, and fired.

Cooper sat down and wished he could think of a damn thing to
say to get that dark look off Dane’s face. He’d done the right thing. It was
what Coop would have done himself. Alea needed to know they would never leave
her. They would fight for her, even if she was the one they had to fight.

A massive man in a three-piece, charcoal-gray Armani suit
stood at the front of the room. He was impressive from head to toe, every inch
of his six foot seven inch muscled frame encased in what had to be a couple
thousand dollars’ worth of designer handmade wool. Cooper had to give it to
him. Dominic Anthony made an impression. If he hadn’t known what the man’s
profession was, he would have immediately thought gangster, and not the kind
who followed orders. Oh, no, Dominic Anthony would be the one tasking his
soldiers to kill. He had pitch-black hair and some of the darkest eyes Cooper
had ever seen—and he didn’t just mean their color.

“Thanks for coming on such short notice, gentlemen.” Dominic
had a deep authoritative voice to go along with his intimidating physique. “I
know you just got off the plane, but I think it’s important we go over some of
the things Riley has uncovered in the last couple of hours.”

“By all means. Tell us,” Talib insisted, taking his seat
between his brothers. “I want my cousin to feel safe as soon as possible. She’s
getting married in the next few weeks. I would like to have some confidence
that her wedding will be peaceful. We’ll need added security.”

“I’ll handle it,” Dane said, frowning. He was such a control
freak. He wasn’t thinking at all.

“No, we’ll need to handle Lea,” Coop shot back.

Dane had been married. Did he not remember everything that
went into a wedding? Coop had been in the wedding party of three of his
brothers’ weddings, and they had all been nearly comatose by the end of it.
This was a damn royal wedding to boot, one they had to throw together in a few
weeks. Cooper could foresee all kinds of trouble. Alea was being forced to the
altar. They’d have to spend long hours convincing her that they could handle
being her husbands. He had no doubt about how they would accomplish that. In
bed. At least that made him smile.

“I think we can handle security for our own wedding,” Lan
said.

“Are you planning on standing at the altar covered in
handguns?” Coop asked.

Lan shrugged. “Not just handguns. I was going to add a P-90
and some knives, too. I feel naked without them.”

“You can’t be covered in firearms in our wedding pictures,”
Dane said, his lips curving up in the first smile Coop had seen on him all day.
“What is wrong with you?”

Dominic sighed, those dark eyes rolling slightly. It was
obvious the man was not impressed with their banter. “If the three of you are
done making wedding plans?” He turned to his two partners. “This shit is so not
happening with us. If we find a chick, it’s going to be no muss, no fuss. It’s
Vegas or nothing. Now, let’s move on. Sheikh, we’ve hit a brick wall with the
whole Caymans account thing. I sent Law and Riley to the island where they
canvassed the banks, and no one was talking. I tried bribes, but those are
well-trained employees. Or they’re terrified of the people they work for. Even
if the clients are criminals, if something came out about secret accounts, the
mob and the cartels would not be pleased.”

“You told us you had some good news,” Dane said, his jaw
tight.

“I have some news about the girl who’s on the news right
now.” He looked down at his file. “Brittany Hahn. She’s a twenty-two year old
from San Bernadino. She was partying in Tijuana during spring break a couple of
years ago when she was taken by the same group that was hired to acquire Alea.
I’ve done a little more background on these thugs. They’re tied to a cartel in
Colombia. Real entrepreneurs, those guys. They’re diversifying. This particular
cartel has its hands in cocaine, slavery, and kidnap for fun and profit. It’s a
new enterprise that’s starting to become more popular. They take high value
targets like celebrities and upper-level businessmen, then they ransom them
back to their families or businesses. Let me tell you, if you’ve got money, you
don’t walk around parts of South America without ransom insurance.”

“But my cousin wasn’t taken from South America,” Kade said.

“No. But I believe this was a kidnap for hire all the same,”
Dominic said.

“We’ve gone over and over everything, and it’s the only
thing that makes sense,” Riley explained, taking over. “If she’d been taken for
use in the brothel, then she would have been raped.”

“Alea was raped,” Cooper stated grimly. “Maybe not
physically, but she was violated all the same.”

If Burke and Cole Lennox hadn’t already killed the
motherfuckers and burned down that house, Cooper would be on his way to
Colombia.

“Agreed.” Riley nodded. “But nevertheless if the purpose of
her kidnapping was to use her as a prostitute, she would not have been
discovered fully intact, so to speak. So the question then is, why was she
taken at all? And who was paying for her upkeep?”

“I assume someone was going to buy her,” Dane surmised, his
hands tightening into fists. “And they were holding her for this asshole.”

“I don’t know about that,” Dominic said. “Put yourself into the
head of a man who would purchase a female for his own use. We’re not talking
about D/s, but true criminal slavery. Still, the owner’s impulse would be very
similar to what a real Dom would feel.”

“Possessive.” Cooper knew exactly what he was talking about.
They all found the possessive instinct at first with Alea. “Any man who would
want to buy a virgin is going to be possessive and territorial.”

“He wouldn’t leave her there for long. He wouldn’t leave her
training to someone else,” Lan added. “I know I wouldn’t. And the so-called
training they gave her was mostly psychological torture.”

“And they got her hooked on drugs,” Cooper added. He hated
the thought of his Alea strung out and aching. They had used the drugs to keep
her calm and quiet and to make her dependent. Alea was strong. He could imagine
she’d given the fuckers hell in the beginning. “Do you think they would do that
at some buyer’s request?”

“No, especially not heroin. That’s not cheap,” Dominic said.
“I don’t think they had a buyer lined up for Alea at all. These are not the
type of men who allow for installment plans. But they do love a little
blackmail. I have a different theory of what happened. I believe the princess
was kidnapped and that the men had help from an insider who plotted to draw
Alea out, then help to urge the sheikh to pay the ransom as soon as possible.”

Tal shook his head. “I never got a ransom.”

Dominic leaned forward. “Ah, yes, but from the kidnappers’
point of view, why simply take money from the victim’s family when they could
first blackmail the person who set up the abduction? Once they bled their
‘cohort’ dry, they could always come to you with an exorbitant ransom request.
And by doing it this way, they don’t have to give their conspirator any of the
promised kickback. They simply could have cut them out altogether or killed
them. Either way, they’re not sharing the fat ransom. So the longer they kept
your cousin, the more likely you would be to pay an outrageous sum to get her
back. In the meantime, they were busy getting paid by the same dirtbag who
aided them in her kidnapping.”

“But the Lennox brothers found her first,” Cooper pointed
out.

“Yes, and their only job was to rescue the princess and save
the girls. They weren’t investigating the whys and wherefores because everyone
assumed Alea had been caught up in a simple slavery ring. So the question
becomes, who hates the princess enough to subject her to hell? And more than
that, who needed the money her ransom would have brought?”

Dane held up a hand. “You said this had something to do with
that girl on TV, the Hahn woman. Are you trying to tell us she had something to
do with this?”

“Not at all,” Riley replied. “She really was a victim, and
as far as I can tell, she has some very dark emotions toward Alea. You see, we
believe that her story is true. Alea really was there during her torture, but
maybe she was forced to use drugs as well. If so, her memory is not necessarily
accurate. She would have had nightmares and delusions. It would be easy in that
situation to see Alea as a villain. She wasn’t raped the way Brittany was. Even
without the drugs, it’s possible that, because Alea’s torture was easier than
her own, she would be resentful. I’ve talked to some of the other victims, and
most of them see Alea as one of them. A couple of the women asked me to reach
out to her. They want to meet and talk because they’re the only ones who really
know what happened.”

“So if she’s not the one who helped with Alea’s kidnapping,
what does she have to do with the person who did?” Cooper was starting to get
antsy. His instincts had always been good, and he didn’t like the way his spine
was prickling now. Something was very wrong.

It was the same feeling he’d had when he and Dane had been
in the Korengal Valley just before everything went to hell. It was a
combination of adrenaline and pure doom.

“Someone sent her money to buy a new wardrobe before her TV
appearances.”

“Someone put her up to this? Someone wants to ruin Alea’s
image?” Lan asked.

“Yes, the same someone who wanted to use her to make money.
It would have been easy to hire someone to simply kidnap the princess. She was
vulnerable in the States. She didn’t have the same type of security. The flip
side was not a lot of people knew her connections to the royal family. There
were some people in the embassy, but almost no regular New Yorkers knew who she
was.”

Dominic Anthony seemed to deeply love the sound of his own
voice. He was dragging this thing out like Sherlock Holmes reporting to the
damn queen. “Who? Just give us a damn name please.”

Law seemed to be the only one who wasn’t into theatrics.
“It’s one of the Thurston-Hughes people, most likely the chick, Yasmin. She was
working for Reaching Across Cultures, the charity fund Alea had originally set
up and planned to head once she got her master’s degree. The money that went to
Brittany Hahn came from an account directly accessed by the charity fund
director. I also confirmed that the Thurston-Hughes family has several offshore
accounts, several in the Caymans.”

Talib had turned a dull red. Cooper briefly wondered if they
still chopped off heads in Bezakistan. “Yasmin offered to head the charity in
Alea’s stead. She was also the first one to call and to beg me to pay whatever
ransom they asked for.”

“She was a jealous child,” Rafe said, running a hand through
his hair. “She had everything given to her, but she couldn’t stand the fact
that Alea lived in the palace. That Alea was called princess. Her mother and
father were incredibly wealthy. Our parents were close to them. After Alea’s
mother and father died, Yasmin’s parents offered to take her in, but my mother
wouldn’t have it. She told me she was afraid Yasmin would make Alea’s life
difficult. I would have thought she’d have grown up and gotten over it.”

“I don’t believe she has. She only married Oliver because
she thought Alea wanted him. I overheard her talking to some friends at her
engagement party,” Kade said.

“And you never bothered to mention this?” Talib asked.

“I thought she was just a jealous bitch. I didn’t realize
she was crazy enough to have Alea kidnapped,” Kade shot back. “Do we know where
Yasmin is in the palace?”

Cooper felt his blood run cold. “She’s in the palace? Why
the fuck is she here?”

Dominic answered that one. “I thought it was best to bring
her here. I wanted to be able to keep an eye on her. I suspected either she or
her husband was involved about a week ago. I had Talib invite them here to
discuss the further search for Alea. We told her that she could be critical to
the effort. I knew she couldn’t resist being the center of attention.”

“So this time she just intended to kill Alea?” Lan asked.

“Oh, no. That plane was insured heavily, plus she managed to
bilk her brother-in-law into opening up his accounts so she could upgrade
security. I had someone tailing her and listening in on her cell phone
conversations for a couple of days. She pocketed the cash. I’m a little worried
though because she recently took out a twenty million dollar life insurance
policy on her husband. I think once she decided Alea was dead, she no longer
needed Oliver Thurston–Hughes. Since she signed a prenup, eliminating him would
be her only way of taking as much of his family’s wealth as she could. I intend
to have a discussion with Oliver as soon as this meeting is over.”

Tal reached for the phone on the conference table in front
of him. He pressed a single button. “I need you to put Yasmin Thurston-Hughes
under lockdown. Yes, that’s right. She does not have freedom to roam the
palace. Cut her phone lines and her Internet access. Do not allow her to leave
under any circumstances. And find her husband. Bring him to me in the
conference room.”